How do I promote an affiliate link to make money online? This is one of the problems affiliate marketers in Ghana face a lot, that is the promotion of the products they find on affiliate programs. 

After writing on the topic of How affiliate marketing works I wanted to go a little bit more in-depth on the ways in which you can promote your affiliate link.

Every affiliate marketer needs traffic otherwise you will never make any sales. If there are no human eyeballs on your offer, then the potential to earn an income from your affiliate marketing efforts will never materialise.

Of course, there are great ways to promote your affiliate links and then there are not so great ways.

In this post, I want to cover the best way you can promote your affiliate links, as well as give you some insight into what to avoid as a beginner so you do not waste time, money and effort.

I am going to assume that you know about affiliate marketing, you have a product to promote and you know the link that you want to promote. If you do not yet have a product to promote then check out my article on Top 10 Affiliate Programs for Bloggers and Marketers.

In this blog post you will learn:

1. How to use blogging to promote your affiliate links
2. How to use product reviews to promote your affiliate links
3. How to use SEO to promote your affiliate links
4. How to use email marketing to promote your affiliate links
5. How to use display banners to promote your affiliate links
6. How to use PPC to promote your affiliate links
7. What to avoid when promoting affiliate links

Read Also: How to make money online

How To Use Blogging To Promote Your Affiliate Links

Blogging is probably one of the best ways to promote your affiliate link, but it is one of the most time-consuming ways that take time to develop traction.

Why?

Because you have to build a blog, add content to it and then start promoting that content. When you start promoting that content you have to build a presence online as an authoritative figure so it will take time for people to trust your brand.

Whilst blogging has its downside, it is the best way because it is then easy to create a passive income stream from the blog.

As they say, spend time doing the work once and then it pays for itself over and over again later.

If you have not yet started a blog you can read my article on How to create a blog without coding using WordPress, where I take you through a step by step guide. You can start a blog for as little as $3.95 through Bluehost when you use my referral link.

The key to promoting your affiliate links with a blog is to create content that is valuable and useful for the reader.

Your content must seek to inform and educate the reader. So if you create a blog just to act as an affiliate blog where you place your links everywhere then you will hardly get any results.

Let’s say you are promoting one product with a blog. You should not stuff the blog content with affiliate links just for the sake of adding affiliate links.

For example, if you are writing a review article on the product, a good rule of thumb is to insert the affiliate link once every 500 words. You do not want to appear obvious to the reader by linking the keyword at every chance you get.

What I like to do is a link in the introduction of my content and then create a specific call to action at the conclusion of my content.

You should also track your affiliate links to see which article or content is driving sales for you. This makes it easier to see what is working within your blog and where your focus should be.

A great place for help on tracking your affiliate links With Google Analytics is Matthew Woodward’s article on How To Track Anything With Google Analytics Event Tracking.

Another important point for you to know is that Google recommends that bloggers use the rel=”nofollow” tag attached to their affiliate link. This ensures that when you place a paid affiliate link in your blog post it will not affect Google’s search results and consequently your site’s ranking in the search results.

Also if you are not sure about the content that you are linking to, it is good practise to use the rel=”nofollow” tag at the end of your link, so that the authority from your website page, known as link juice to Google, will not pass to the website where the content is questionable.

YouTube

You can also create a YouTube channel specifically for product reviews or as an educational platform where you recommend the affiliate product. Make sure to place the affiliate link within your description box and cloak the affiliate link as well using the cloaking tools I mentioned above.

The most important step when creating product reviews on YouTube is to ensure that the content of your video is of high quality. Product reviews should be detailed and honest. These are two determining factors as to whether any viewer takes you seriously enough to buy your recommended product.

The biggest mistake you can do is to go on YouTube simply with the purpose of selling your product. So for example, creating a video that highlights the product and merely asking for a sale is not good enough. I can almost guarantee that you will not get any visitors to your affiliate offers.

However, if you take the time to provide content that is helpful, useful and honest, people would thank you for taking the time to show them more about the product by using your affiliate link.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO, blogging and niche websites all go together.  If you have a blog or website, your main goal should be to create content that is SEO friendly.

That means that the search engines can find your website and rank it within the search results. This makes it easy for people to find, read your content and eventually click on your affiliate link.

You should also make sure that there is a lot of search traffic for the product that you are promoting.

What to consider when creating an SEO friendly niche website/blog:    

1. Keywords

These are the words that people are searching for in the search engines that will show your website in the search results. If your website is for the purpose of making money, then you should focus on buyer intent keywords.

For example:

• Best weight loss pills
• Weight loss pills that work
• Best digital camera for video marketing
• Wooden wardrobe discount sale

You should distinguish buyer intent related keywords from informational keywords. For example, some informational keywords where the searcher does not have a buying intent are:

• Weight loss pills help
• Weight loss pills blog
• How to do video marketing
• Video marketing tutorial
• Wooden wardrobe pictures

2. Content

Google likes valuable content that is helpful and useful. The longer your content (some say more than 2000 words), the more authority Google attaches to your website.

Therefore when writing content for SEO related affiliate websites, your goal should be to over-deliver on content.

Try to also create unique content. Most websites touch on similar topics but to stand out from the rest you can take a piece of content that is great and either update it or add to it.

3. Backlinks

This is the most important thing that you can do for your affiliate website to work for you. Backlinking is simply the process of having authoritative websites link to yours. There are many good ways that you can achieve this:

• Guest posting writing blog posts or articles for authoritative websites in your niche and linking back to yours.
• Outreach link building editorial links from authoritative websites. This can also include simple roundup posts that link back to your site as an authority to consider.
• Social shares from your website to social media platforms.

Email Marketing

The money is definitely in the list that is why you should be building your email list as an affiliate marketer. Communicating with your potential customers via email is one of the easiest traffic sources to tap into especially if you have cultivated, nurtured and added some type of value to your subscribers.

In the event that social media sites terminate your account for policy violations or Google penalises your website, you will always have your email list as a source of traffic.

Of course, the bigger your list, the more likely you are to make sales.

The rates go something like this. 30% of your email list will likely open your emails, 13% would likely read your email and click on your link and then 2% would likely buy something that you recommend.

So if you are selling a product where the affiliate commission is $25 per referral or sale and you have an email list of 10,000, then you have the potential to earn $5000 from one email blast.

That is the power of an email list.

A few things to remember when using your email list

• Don’t oversell your email list.

You do not want to sell products all the time to your list. No one likes to be sold to, so keep your emails more valuable then anything by following an 80/20 split. 80% more value 20% sales.

• Segment your list often for more opens, more click throughs and more sales.

You can even have subscribers that click on a certain link, opt in again in a special funnel. This tells you that these subscribers are more serious and therefore are more likely to buy your products.

• Split test subject lines and email content.

You will get more open rates when you do this. Some people may not resonate with one subject line, but will resonate with another. Don’t be afraid to test your subject lines.

• Clean your list.

Sometimes a list might go cold. You may notice that your open rates are getting lower and lower. If that is the case it is time to clean your email list and get rid of those subscribers who no longer open your emails. The way I like to do it, is like this:

1. I segment my email list with those people who have not opened my email within a month.
2. I send one email to that segment letting them know that I have noticed that they have not opened my emails and asking if they would like to stay. If they wish to stay on my list they should click on a special link within the email.
3. I give them 3 days to do that.
4. Anyone who does not open my email or click on the link will get deleted after 3 days.

It is a good idea to always keep your email list fresh because this affects your email account score and your ability to deliver emails to your subscriber’s inbox.

It also keeps your email software cost down so you will only be paying to have quality email subscribers on your list.

• Always cloak your affiliate links.

Email softwares do not like affiliate links. This is why it is important to cloak your affiliate links using link tracking software like Clickmagick or link shorteners like Goo.gl, Bit.ly or Tiny URL.

The best way that you can cloak affiliate links for email marketing is by using the Clickmagick software as it gives you the ability to track which email converted into sales.

It also lets you create your own custom domain and split test different landing pages to see which one produces better results.

Link shorteners like Goo.gl, Bit.ly or Tiny URL only cloak your affiliate link but do not allow you to analyse your clicks so you can optimise your marketing. This is something to be wary of. 

PPC Advertising

The biggest names in PPC (pay per click) advertising are Google Adwords, Bing Ads and Facebook Ads.

With PPC you are only paying for the click to your link. How it works, is you bid a certain price for relevant keywords as with Google Adwords or Bing Ads and interests as with Facebook Ads.

The keywords are all related to the product that you are selling. If you win the bid then your ad may show up in the search results as in the below examples.

The key to having effective PPC ads is to ensure that you track your data using a tool like Clickmagick.

You will be able to track which keywords are giving you conversions on your website so you can optimise your ad for better results by focusing only on the converting keywords.

If you are using Facebook PPC ads to drive traffic to an affiliate offer, be sure that you are testing different interests within your ad sets and use tracking tools to measure your results.

So if Facebook changes their algorithm which affects how you run your ads, you will get access to that updated material ensuring that you are always using current strategies.

The creators of the course also give weekly group coaching calls which are invaluable as they can critique your ads and help you to optimise them. They are also pretty active in the private Facebook members group answering questions from their members.

As a bonus they allow you to promote their course to other potential students where you can earn $500 per affiliate sale.

Bottom Line

Promoting products with these channels requires dedication, determination and commitment. If you keep doing it right you will make sales and earn your commisions

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